Save the Frick Collection

By David Masello

June 12, 2014

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CreditCreditDavid Biskup

AMERICA has few mansions built by a family with an art collection they meant to share with the public. So when word came this week that the Frick Collection, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, was planning to expand and build a six-story addition where there is now a discreet garden and a splashing fountain with lily pads — one of those few places in the cityscape where we are allowed to stop and breathe — I felt blunt disappointment, as well as betrayal.

The Frick, where I go almost weekly, is not just a museum but a grand former residence whose intimate, plush rooms can be toured in an hour or two. I like to think of it as the people’s Gracie Mansion, where anyone can reside for a spell as a Gilded Age citizen. Henry Clay Frick himself stipulated that his house and museum be “for the use and benefit of all persons whomsoever.”

I have yet to visit any museum in the world more satisfying to me than the Frick. I love the domestic atmosphere, the muted natural light within, the different moods one experiences from room to room, its strict rules about school groups and young children and people hollering into their cellphones, and, most important, the artworks on the walls. There is just enough to take it all in within a visit. I fear that after its proposed expansion the museum will become more of a burden than a retreat.

Here is another institution that now threatens to grow beyond itself, its metaphorical canvas becoming too big for its geographic frame. I stopped going to the Museum of Modern Art once it morphed into something as charming as an airport terminal, with tarmacs of empty land surrounding it, one result of bulldozing blocks of townhouses, a venerable hotel and other appealing buildings. Should some hangar-scale exhibition space rise on the land that the institution has staked out, I imagine the curators wheeling in yet another Richard Serra that immediately fills the space and then declaring, “We need more room.” The Whitney Museum of American Art is abandoning its own modest building — one of the great architectural sculptures of our era — in favor of a new structure that assumes the profile of stacked aluminum trailers.

The Frick was not supposed to need any more room. Its collection was mostly complete when the house was finished in 1914. Other items have since been added, but the Frick never struck me as an institution intent on adding to its inventory, its curators raising their paddles at auctions of old masters in an effort to fill basement rooms and warehouses.

And, yet, when I think of the artworks that I seek out there on every visit, I realize that many represent a desire for growth and change, expansion and acquisition. When I look at the achingly handsome terra-cotta bust of Louis-Étienne Vincent-Marniola, a wavy-haired young man so beautiful I can honestly say I have a romantic yearning for him, I need to remember that as a member of Napoleon’s Conseil d’État, he was in the service of a megalomaniac whose only goal was to acquire new land and power. Vermeer’s scene of the “Officer and Laughing Girl” reveals a map of the Netherlands on a wall, a jingoistic reminder of the strength of a nation whose colonies furnished it with an embarrassment of riches. And for decades now, I have had regular (one-way) conversations with Lodovico Capponi, the haughty, codpiece-clad figure painted by Bronzino. Capponi, depicted in his early 20s, served as an influential page in the Medici court, aiding a dynasty in its lust for power and wealth.

Many of the people who are pictured or the gods who are cast in bronze are decidedly ambitious, hardly complacent in their accomplishments and acquisitions. Ingres’s “Comtesse d’Haussonville” was no mere trophy wife but one who wrote numerous books while her husband rose in the French diplomatic corps. Hans Holbein the Younger’s “Sir Thomas More” depicts a headstrong man at the height of his career, but so determined in his beliefs and intent on countering his king, Henry VIII, that he wound up headless. William Hogarth depicted one of the world’s richest women, Mary Edwards, while Gainsborough painted fancy ladies and barons and earls amid their estates. Elsewhere, there are wealthy merchants by Frans Hals, Fragonard’s randy figures desperately running through gardens in pursuit of further assignations, and opulent gold-leafed scenes of piety by early Renaissance masters.

Museums don’t need as much space as they desire. After all, painters are content to stay within their frames. When the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., was going through its just-completed expansion, a sizable portion of the museum’s collection of paintings was contained within a few small rooms, the canvases crowded together salon-style, an efficient and inspiring arrangement. I wanted to tell the Clark’s board to halt the bulldozers outside and consider permanently hanging the pictures in tight groupings.

Henry Clay Frick himself was hardly modest in his goals to be rich, to monopolize the coal and steel markets and to amass one of the best private art collections in the world, but the Manifest Destiny doctrine that museums have adopted has to end somewhere. I am merely suggesting that the directors of the Frick take the time to step into that courtyard they now want to fill in, listen to the birds, look back at their quiet, inviting museum, and realize that what they have now is enough.

Correction:June 18, 2014

An Op-Ed essay on Friday opposing the proposed expansion of the Frick Collection mischaracterized the plans. They call for a six-story addition, not a tower.

David Masello is the executive editor of Milieu, a magazine about design.